Sword at Sunset

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  We had passed under the narrow arched doorway into the courtyard again. The strange sense of danger was less pressing now, and I had begun to tell myself that I was a fool. I checked beside the wellhead and turned to look at her. She seemed not so remote now, as though from her, too, the shadow was passing, as though the life were waking in her again; and I noticed for the first time that she had left off her braids and knotted up the heavy masses of her hair at the back of her head after the manner of Roman women; that was partly what had made her seem strange to me. I would have caught her into my arms and kissed her then, heedless of the eyes looking on, but she held me off with both hands on my breast, begging with a strange urgency, ‘No, Artos! Not here! Please, please not here!’ and the moment passed, and there were the dark figures of nuns about us, and she was turning from one to another, taking her leave of them, with old Blanid clutching her bundle on the outskirts of the cluster. ‘God be with you, Sister Honoria, Sister Rufia – pray for me – Sister Praxedes.’ But it was not a time to be lingering over farewells. I caught her up and bore her out through the fluttering black-robed throng, across the eating hall and down the passageway and the shallow steps beyond. A Sister scurried ahead to draw the bolts and bars of the door. Blanid flapped along with toothless cluckings of delight in our rear. And so, much as though I were bearing off a bride by force, I carried Guenhumara out into the crowded street.

  We were greeted by a roar from those near enough to see what was happening, a high, delighted squealing from the women, a crash of laughter and shouted welcome from my own Companions. Bedwyr had dismounted, and stood holding Arian’s bridle besides his own horse’s, while Cabal, sitting alert and quivering where I had left him, sprang up with wildly lashing tail. I tossed Guenhumara up onto Arian’s back and taking the reins from Bedwyr, mounted behind her and settled her into the crook of my bridle arm. Bedwyr was laughing up at me, his crooked face alight and on fire with his laughter. ‘Sa sa! Bravely done, old Hero! Here is matter for a harp song!’

  ‘Make it for us after supper!’ I cried, and struck my heel into the horse’s flank.

  Arian broke forward, Bedwyr swung into his saddle, Pharic pressed up on my other side calling greetings to his sister, and the rest of the Company came jingling and clattering after me. Guenhumara looked back over my shoulder at the small deep-set door in the eyeless nunnery wall, and I felt her shiver. The kind of swift convulsive shudder that is supposed to mean a gray goose flying over one’s grave; and instinctively I tightened my arm about her. ‘What is it? Were you unhappy there? Were they not kind to you after all?’ Under the roar of voices, the clatter of hooves and jinkety-jink of harness, we could speak together as privately as though we were alone on Eildon slopes with only the curlew to overhear. ‘Because if that is the way of it, I’ll—’

  She shook her head. ‘They were very kind to me, the Sisters, and even the Mother Abbess whom they all fear. But it was like being in a cage. I could not breathe or stretch my wings – and no fresh wind ever blew through the bars ... ’

  ‘You have always hated cages, haven’t you – cages and chains.’

  ‘Always. I think in a way I have always been afraid of them.’ She gave a small shaken laugh. ‘When I was fourteen, the man I was to marry gave me a pair of linnets in a wicker cage. You were supposed to hang it in a tree, and the linnet would sing to you all day long. I kept them for three days because they were his gift and I loved him, and then I could not bear it any more, and I opened the little door and let them go.’

  The corner of the street hid the House of the Holy Ladies from view, and she fetched a quick sigh that sounded like relief, and turned face forward again.

  chapter twenty

  The Beast and the Flower

  I HAVE NEVER KNOWN SUCH AN AUTUMN FOR BERRIES AS WE had that year. Every dog-rose tangle was flame-flecked with hips, every whitethorn looked from a little distance to be the color of dried blood, bryony and honeysuckle ramped along the wood-shores scattering their red fire-jewels among the gray seed-smoke of the clematis, and old Blanid shook her head and mumbled darkly of a cruel winter on the way. But it has often seemed to me that the threat of an especially hard winter after a big berry crop is no more than a tale that the old wives tell each other; and I paid little heed. We always made ready as best we could for a hard winter, at Trimontium, and most years we got it.

  On the third day after we returned to our winter quarters, word was brought to me that Druim Dhu had come into camp, seeking to speak with me. By this time the Dark People of our nearest hills had lost much of their strangeness in our eyes. Many of our lads even forgot to cross their fingers if they stepped in a Dark One’s shadow, and the Dark People on their side had lost much of their fear of us. It was no unusual thing nowadays for Druim Dhu or one of his brothers to come and set themselves down by our cooking fires, even eat if they were hungry, borrow a hammer or a cooking pot – they were great borrowers, but more scrupulous in their returning than many churched Christians are – and perhaps leave a gift of a freshly taken wild honeycomb or a couple of salmon trout behind, when they disappeared as silently as they had come.

  So I found Druim now, squatting beside the master armorer in his dark cavern of a workshop, and watching with attentive interest, head a little on one side as a dog sits beside a mousehole, while he renewed some broken links in a war shirt. He got up when he saw me coming, and came to meet me with his usual palm-to-forehead salutation. ‘May the sun shine on my lord’s face by day and the moon guide his feet in the darkness.’

  I returned the greeting, and waited for whatever it was that he had come to say to me. It was never any good trying to hurry matters with Druim Dhu, or any of his kind. One waited for them to be ready, and when they were ready, they spoke. He watched a peregrine hovering above the fort until I could have shaken him, and then said without any preamble, ‘Let my lord send the horses south this winter.’

  I looked at him keenly. That was a course that I had always striven to avoid. ‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘We have always kept them with us in winter quarters before.’

  ‘Not through such a winter as this one will be.’

  ‘You believe that it is going to be a hard one?’ If he talked to me of berries, I should send him to old Blanid, and they could tell each other their old wives’ tales until suppertime.

  ‘There will be such a winter as there has not been since I was a cub scarce done with sucking my mother. A winter like a white beast that strives to tear your heart out.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in my house.’

  There was something in the way he spoke, something in the dark wild eyes, that chilled me suddenly. This was a different thing from Blanid’s talk of berries. ‘What do you mean? How does Earth Mother speak to the Old Woman in your house?’

  He shrugged, but his gaze never left my face. ‘I do not know. I am not a woman, and not old. Earth Mother does not speak to me, though I too should look for a hard winter, taking my fore-tidings from the changed ways of the deer and the wolf kind. I know only that when Earth Mother speaks to the Old Woman, what she tells is true.’

  ‘And so in my place, you would send the horses south.’

  ‘If I wished still to be a horse lord in the spring. There will be no grazing-out in mild spells, this year; and the Hairy Ones, the Wolf-People, will hunt to the very gates of the fortress.’

  ‘So. I will think upon it. Go now and get something to eat. My thanks for bringing me the warning of Earth Mother.’

  I did think upon it, deeply, all the rest of that day; and when the evening meal was over, I called Cei and Bedwyr and Pharic and the rest of my chiefs and captains to my own quarters. We had a little fire of peat and birch bark and wild cherry logs in a battered brazier, for already the evenings were turning cold, and when all of us were gathered about it, I told them. ‘Brothers, I have been thinking; and out of my thinking, I am decided this year to make a change in our usual custom, and
send the horses south for the winter.’

  A dozen startled faces looked back at me in the red upward glow of the brazier. Cei was the first to speak, playing in the way he had with the blue glass bracelets on his wrist. ‘I thought you would as lief part with your sword arm as with the horses.’

  ‘Almost as lief,’ I said.

  Bedwyr, squatting on the pile of wolfskins that sometimes served me as a bed, his harp as usual on his knee, leaned forward into the light that turned his face into a copper mask. ‘Then why this sudden desire for amputation?’

  ‘Because Earth Mother has told the Old Woman in Druim’s house that this will be a winter like a white beast that strives to tear men’s hearts out. There will be no grazing-out in the mild spells, and the Wolf-People will hunt to the fortress gates. So says Earth Mother.’

  Pharic’s black brows drew together. ‘And think you that Druim’s word and the word of the Old Woman and Earth Mother are to be trusted so much?’ He broke into a somewhat scornful grin. ‘Oh, I doubt not that they are speaking the truth as they believe it. So is old Blanid when she babbles of autumn berries. They believe so much, the Little Dark People, but need we believe also?’

  ‘I – think so, yes. I propose to act on it as though I did, at all events; and if I am wrong, I give you leave to point the finger of laughter at me for all time.’

  Within a week the horses had all gone south, save for three or four of the hardy hill ponies that we kept against possible need of a messenger. Most of our light riders were of course needed to take them, one half directly south to the Corstopitum depot and on to Eburacum, and the other by Castra Cunetium and down to Deva. And with each, I sent half a squadron of the Companions – Flavian, as it chanced, in command. I gave orders, since there seemed little help for it, that the men were to winter with the horses, and bring them up again in the spring.

  We had brought up the last of the winter supplies with us from Corstopitum, and with good stocks of meal and salted carcasses in the long store barn, we settled down to make all secure and galley-shape for the winter that Druim Dhu had promised us. We mended again the cracks in the barrack-row walls, where the autumn rains had washed out the mud of our previous repairs (we were almost as great workers with mud, by that time, as the swallows who built every spring under the eaves of the Praetorium), we got in extra peat and firewood, melted down every scrap of fat for candles, and piled up great ricks of russet bracken for bedding and the ponies’ fodder. This being our fifth winter in the Three Hills, we must push farther afield in our foraging and woodcutting, and without the aid of the wiry little pack beasts that in past winters we had relied on to carry the loads. But with no horses to tend and exercise, we had more time than usual on our hands even so; and we hunted hard, that autumn, eating fresh meat while we could.

  I had thought, naturally, to see no more of the horses or the men who had gone with them, until spring, but in half a month the Eburacum part of the squadron under Corfil, who had stepped into Fercos’s place as Flavian’s second, plodded in on foot, having done the march, so they reported without undue humility, in the exact nine days laid down for the Legions in the days of good roads. And two days after Samhain, as though his arrival was the signal for the white beast to begin his prowling, Flavian himself, with his half squadron behind him, staggered in through the Praetorium Gate in a blinding snowstorm.

  ‘I didn’t think we were going to make it,’ he said, when he came to me in my quarters.

  I cursed him where he stood. ‘You bleeding fool! Didn’t I give the whole lot of you orders to stay south until the spring – and you with a wife and son in Deva!’

  He blinked at me in the light of the lantern, the snow on his shoulders melting into dark wetness at the edges, and grinned, weary but unashamed. ‘It is a different matter for the auxiliaries. We are the Brotherhood, and we have always been an unruly lot. We didn’t like the order, so we took a vote on it and decided to mutiny.’

  Earth Mother had spoken truth. By mid-November we were sunk so deep in winter that we might have been in a world that had never known spring. At first the snow was not deep, save in the hollows and the northward-facing glens, for the first fall had melted, and the stuff that followed it was wet, sleet and half-frozen rain that drove and drenched across the fort before bitter gales from the northeast. Eildon must have sheltered us a little, but I think not much, and the wind howled day after day down through the hazel woods to fling itself like a living enemy upon the old red sandstone fort above the river. The woods boomed and roared like a great sea beating upon a wild coast; and indeed for days at a time, for all that we could see of Eildon and the hills beyond, we might have been perched on some headland high above a raging sea. And then after a month, the wild gales fell still, and out of the stillness came snow, and an ever-increasing cold that made the sword hilt sear the hand, and narrowed the spring under the hazel bushes that had been the gift of the Little Dark People to the merest dribbling thread of water, under a curtain of black ice. And in the long nights the strange, colored fires that Pharic’s people called the ‘Crown of the North’ and Druim’s ‘The Dancers’ played more brightly than ever I had seen them, across the northern sky.

  But under the covering of snow, our log and brushwood piles were broad and long, and the peat stacks rose beside the living place doors, the stores were gathered in, and we had even a cartload of sour wine to help out the local heather beer at the times when men need to make merry. And with no need to trouble for the horses’ fodder (but God of gods, how we missed the stamping in the picket lines, and how the loneliness, the sense of being utterly cut off from the world, increased upon us with the horses gone!) we felt that we could outlast the winter well enough.

  That was until Midwinter’s night.

  For all of us that night had some meaning. For those of us who were Christians, it had become the custom in our fathers’ fathers’ time to celebrate the birth of the Christos on that night, when the old year goes down into the dark, and out of the dark all things are born anew. To those who followed the Old Faith, it was the night of the Midwinter Fires, when one made all the light and heat one could, to help the sun grow strong again and drive out the darkness and the cold. For the few among us who bore the small telltale brand of Mithras between the brows, it was, just as to the Christians, the Saviour’s birth night. To most of us it was, I suppose, in some sort a mingling of all these things, and to all of us, when the worship was over, it was a night for as much merrymaking as could be crammed into it, and as much heather beer. In an open winter when the hunting was good, we were able to get fresh meat for the Midwinter feast; but this year there had been no hunting for upward of a month, and we should have no release from the tyranny of boiled salt beef and mutton. But there was always the beer. Each year I released three days’ supply of beer to make up for the shortage in other directions. That meant the portion of the garrison who had weaker heads than the rest, or who got more than their fair share, were drunk by midnight, and greeted the next day with aching head and bloodshot eyes and tempers. What would have happened if the fort had ever been attacked at that time, I sweat to think; but I knew the limits of my power with the wild auxiliaries; they were not the Company, and it did not extend to keeping them sober on Midwinter night. Besides, men do not remain at their best, especially cut off in the wilds, if they may not make merry to the full, now and then.

  But I, I dreaded Midwinter, and was always devoutly thankful when it was over for another year and the fort not burned down about our ears.

  This particular Christ’s Mass night was no worse than its forerunners had been, until one of the mule drivers having (so his mates said afterward) drunk himself into a state of deep suspicion of the world, got the idea that he was somehow being cheated of his fair share, and stealing a half-full beerskin, departed to make merry by himself in a corner of the derelict mill shed which backed onto the main store barn. What happened after that, no one can ever know. In all likelihood he kicked over the
lantern he had brought with him and it opened as it fell, the guttering flame caught the dry-bracken fodder stored there, and the wind blowing through the holes in the roof did the rest.

  The first that anyone knew of the danger was when one of the guard (we always kept a small and comparatively sober guard, even on Midwinter’s night) saw smoke curling up through the rents in the mill shed roof.

  I was with the main uproar in the mess hall when the man came running with his news, and the Companions and most of the auxiliaries gathered there with me; but the baggage train folk had quarters of their own beyond the old parade ground, and there would be small knots making merry all over the camp, many of them half drunk by this time. I got hold of Prosper, who was still smiling somewhat owlishly into the fire while the other men stumbled cursing to their feet all about him, and shook him into awareness. ‘Get out of here and sound me the alarm, and keep on sounding it!’ I told him, and casting a hurried glance around me, saw that most of the Companions, at least, still looked reasonably serviceable.

  ‘They’ll think it’s an attack,’ someone objected.

  ‘What in Hell’s name does that matter, if it gets their heads out of the beer jar?’ I was already running for the door, Cabal leaping ahead of me in wild excitement. I ran as though for my life across the empty parade ground and down toward the lower camp, most of the Brotherhood pelting at my heels, and behind us, clear and true and rock-steady – it is wonderful what habit will do – I heard the notes of the great aurochs horn sounding the alarm.

  By the time we reached the clear space before the mill shed and workshop, there was a crowd that thickened every moment, as men tumbled out from their merrymaking in answer to the urgent summons of the horn and, as word leapt from man to man like heath fire itself, headed down toward the disaster. There could be no doubt now as to where the fire was; flame had followed the smoke; it was already bursting through the rough thatch in a score of places, leaping up into the night, and the flickering glare of it brightened over the gaping faces of the crowd. The wind that had been rising all day was blowing hard from the northeast by that time, driving dark rags of cloud across the frost-fierce stars; driving also the licking flames along the thatch toward the store barn.